Welcome,
Friends.
Today,
Let's center ourselves in conscious awareness and experience spaciousness as a quality of presence.
First,
Find your comfortable position,
Upright but not tense,
Erect and tall.
Take a couple of comfortable,
Deep breaths and allow your body to relax.
Now,
Intentionally,
Take a deep,
Slow breath in and hold,
And as you release,
Allow your sense of awareness to pool beneath the crown of the head and rest.
Next,
Another deep,
Slow breath in and hold,
And as you release,
Allow that sense of awareness to pool down the center of the brain and brain stem to the top of the back of the neck,
Rest.
Another deep,
Slow breath in and hold,
And as you release,
Allow your awareness to pool down the spine to the area behind the heart,
Rest.
Another deep,
Slow breath in and hold,
And as you release,
Allow your awareness to move down the spine to pool in the tailbone and rest.
Take another four breaths on your own,
Holding at the top,
And as you release,
Allow your awareness to center beneath the crown of the head and then down the spine incrementally to pool in the tailbone.
Take about a minute.
Welcome back.
Now,
From this centered position,
Let's explore one quality of presence,
Spaciousness.
Having stepped back from the busy thinking mind,
We have stepped out of the identification with things,
Things we think about,
Things that arise as images,
Which have shape and form and which create our everyday reality.
When we have stepped back from thinking,
We find that instead of confined by things,
We inhabit space.
Space has a presence.
In our lived experience,
Space exists prior to all objects.
The room you are in now occupies space which was here before there was a room.
Someday,
Far off perhaps,
The room will be gone,
But the space will remain.
Take a deep,
Slow breath in,
Hold,
And on the release,
Allow your awareness to acknowledge the quiet spaciousness in which you in all existence come into being.
Simply acknowledge the space that abides.
Continue slow,
Deep breathing.
In Immanuel Kant's epistemology,
Space is posited as a foundation of all thought.
Space is prior to any and all thinking.
We know,
For instance,
That our universe is finite.
It does not go on forever,
Yet we who are bound in our three-dimensional minds and our particular evolutionary history on this planet are functionally unable to think outside or beyond space.
Our universe may not be infinite,
It may have a boundary,
But we cannot conceive of anything beyond that boundary.
What lies beyond the space of the universe?
In our minds,
More space.
Similarly,
In conscious awareness,
When we step back from thought,
We step back from identification with things,
And what we step into is space,
Or more accurately,
Spaciousness.
Being is experienced as a profound and abiding spaciousness.
Being awake means awakening from the identification with objects,
Especially those things that seem to make up our lives,
Our bodies,
Our sensations,
Through which we know the physical world.
Being awake means living always in a sense of spaciousness,
Even as we move about in a physical world.
Throughout our day,
We can cultivate an awareness of the spaciousness in which all our physical experiences arise,
Persist for a finite amount of time,
And then pass away.
This great peace in knowing spaciousness has a ground of all being.
Let's take a few moments in intentional breathing,
Deeply and slowly,
And luxuriating in the spaciousness of being.
Thanks for joining me today.
Hope you have a beautiful day.
